Documentationbreadcrumb arrow Learning pathsbreadcrumb arrow Run your first k6 performance testbreadcrumb arrow Understand the value
Run your first k6 performance test
11 min
Milestone 1
Understand the value
1 min
Milestone 2
Install k6
1 min
Milestone 3
Write test script
2 min
Milestone 4
Run locally
1 min
Milestone 5
Send to Grafana Cloud
1 min
Milestone 6
Analyze results
2 min
Milestone 7
Destination reached
1 min

Understand the value of k6 performance testing

In this milestone, you learn why performance testing with k6 is valuable for ensuring your applications handle real-world traffic.

Performance testing helps you identify problems before they reach production. Without it, issues like slow response times, system failures, or scalability bottlenecks only surface when real users are affected.

k6 lets you simulate realistic user behavior with configurable virtual users, request patterns, and traffic ramping. You can test how your system performs under increasing load to understand capacity limits.

k6 tests integrate into CI/CD pipelines so you can catch regressions early. Results stream to Grafana Cloud for real-time visualization and historical analysis.

If you prefer the in-product flow, go to Testing & synthetics > Performance and click Create a test on the Performance home page. Refer to Get started with Grafana Cloud k6 and k6 Studio for UI and script authoring options.

In the next milestone, you install k6 on your machine so you can start writing and running tests.

Run your first k6 performance test
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Install k6
page 2 of 8